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4 April 2006
Ivy League Applicant Pools Go Up – And Acceptance Rates Go Down
As the saying goes, 'What goes up, must come down.'
When what goes up is the number of applications to a particular school,
what comes down has to be the school's acceptance rate. That's because the number of incoming freshmen that most schools can accommodate stays flat
even when their applicant pool grows.
This is exactly what happened with 2006 Ivy League admissions.
Six of the eight Ivy League schools have released their 2006 admission numbers. With the exception of Harvard, all of them noted significant
increases in their applicant pools and significant decreases in their acceptance rates:
|
|
No. Applied |
App. Pool Growth from '05 |
No. Accepted |
'06 Acc. Rate |
'05 Acc. Rate |
|
Brown |
18,313 |
+ 8.2% |
2,525 |
13.8% |
14.6% |
|
Columbia |
17,148 |
+ 9% |
1,653 |
9.6% |
10.4% |
|
Dartmouth |
13,937 |
+10% |
2,150 |
15.4% |
17% |
|
Harvard |
22,753 |
+0.2% |
2,109 |
9.3% |
9.2% |
|
Univ. of Pennsylvania |
20,479 |
+8% |
3,622 |
17.7% |
20.8% |
|
Yale |
21,099 |
+8.2% |
1,823 |
8.6% |
9.7% |
|
Cornell * |
28,097 |
+15% |
6,927 |
24.7% |
26.1% |
|
Princeton * |
17,563 |
N/A |
1,792 |
10.2% |
10.9% |
* Figures for Cornell and Princeton were added on April 6, after they were announced by those schools.
What does this mean for high school juniors who are planning to apply to Ivy League schools this fall?
1) Early admission programs are definitely worth considering, if you're certain there is one – and only one – school you would rather go to than any other,
regardless of the financial aid package you receive.
The advantage of early admissions programs is that they have higher acceptance rates
than regular admissions programs do. But their main disadvantage is that, in most cases, they are binding, meaning that you promise in advance to attend the school if you are
accepted. That means you won't be able to compare financial aid offers from different schools. (Harvard and Yale are both unusual in having non-binding EA programs.)
2) Large applicant pools will be a fact of life for college applicants for at least several more years. One of the biggest hurdles you will face in
college admissions is simply to get yourself noticed among the hundreds of other applicants with similar backgrounds, GPAs, and test scores.
Your admissions essays
are your best chance at achieving this. They need to be more than merely competently written and grammatically correct. They need to have both
the arguments and the voice that will convince an admissions committee that you are someone they want to have as a student at their college or university.
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